"I'm not. You've good eyesight," she replied.
"But now I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen!" he added; and this statement was as honest as the first. It made Helen infinitely happy; for there was nothing that she so much desired in her inmost heart as to be good-looking.
She drew a long series of cartoons for that gallant who had been hung up in the barbed wire in the moonlight, played at bombs back and forth with the Germans around "Wipers," and been pulled out of mudholes and buried by shells. The cartoons were her best card in the pack of her hospital cheer. One anecdote illustrated called for another. Helen knew more about the life of the army in Flanders than the "brass hats," the staff and all the war correspondents. For these survivors of hell did not want gloomy pictures. Reality was enough without adding to its horrors that of long faces. They liked something to make them smile even when death was at their elbow. They sent her cartoons home in their letters, or if they had no homes, put the sheets away with their treasures. One even cautioned his wife not to be jealous, because this jolly nurse drew cartoons for everybody; and he had the rank of major.
Helen kept on doing what she called real drawings, which were appearing the world around. Even the censors could not find any military secrets in them, particularly after she sent the chief censor a cartoon of her imaginary portrait of a censor in his most diabolical mood of evisceration. Some of the cartoons, too, got into print, bringing more requests from editors, which she could refuse now in view of the checks coming in for the real drawings. M. Vailliant, who had been wounded and was now convalescent, had gathered up some of the floating strands of his affairs and wrote his congratulations to Helen, hoping that she would not go to America after the war. Let America come to her in Paris.
"You are trying to swell my head," she wrote back; "and I do believe that it is a little larger. How can it help being!"
Nevertheless, that tugging at her heart would come at times. When she ought to be perfectly happy she was not, as she found whenever her work gave her a moment to search her inner self.
All this about Helen, when Henriette was just across the road with what the doctors and nurses in Helen's unit referred to as "Lady Truckleford's lot." Sometimes the doctors when they looked in that direction said something almost profane about volunteer organisations and people who had influence. Lady Truckleford flitted back and forth to London, where she was on a number of boards and lists of patronesses without knowing what they were all about unless she asked honourable secretaries, which was a bore, as the honourable secretaries could not be along when somebody gave you a poser. However, she did not allow such details to disturb her placidity for long.
If you were a young officer whose people were of some account and you were only slightly wounded, "Lady Truckleford's lot" was a most delightful lot to be with; and in addition you were certain of attention from real trained nurses who were also a part of the establishment. In charming company you could sit in the same sun and breathe the same air as the convalescents of the professional unit and look out to sea and watch the boats coming and going across the channel; and you could also make trips in automobiles to the neighbouring seaside resort, where once French and English people came in the holidays of peace before the world's game was war. Aside from Henriette among Lady Truckleford's lot was Lady Violet Dearing, characterised by doll-like beauty and a lisp. She was poor and dependent on her friends; and despite her lisp and her attractiveness she had had no luck in making any definite attachment though she was twenty-eight, which is a desperate age for doll-like beauties.
Occasionally Helen went to see Henriette; oftener, indeed, than Henriette came to see her sister. Once Helen made some cartoons for the young wounded officers at tea-time, who thought that they were "ripping." Lady Violet quite agreed with their view, but Henriette was cool to her sister when they parted. Helen made no more cartoons for Lady Truckleford's lot.
Gossip ran its rounds in this as in other communities. Lady Truckleford's lot knew that there was a young American by name of Sanford, who was Henriette's seventeenth cousin; and Lady Violet teased Henriette about the seventeenth cousin when she had been the object of too much attention from the young officers. If anybody who was somebody in the Truckleford world was wounded, the Truckleford lot soon knew it; and if he were interesting it was still possible, in those early days before the hideous old War Office became utterly inconsiderate of all the nicer human feelings, to have him transferred to "more congenial surroundings."